Okay, the argument "we are hobbyists, so don't abuse us" sucks, because you already ask people for money on Patreon. I don't think, that community donates too much, though. Because you ignore them

You don't seem to understand the concepts of "hobbies" and "donations" very well, or the fact that only 4 people accept donations for their OpenMW-associated work, only one of whom works directly on OpenMW itself, and none of whom do much to advertise their Patreons given that their hobbyist considerations vastly outweigh money-making considerations.

The argument "wiki describes Morrowind vanilla behaviour, bla, bla, bla" sucks, because, you know, there are some industry standards. I mean, modern standards. Nope, don't speak about Bethesda games - they already got their portion of jokes about using Morrowind engine in Fallout 86. And squares on the noses in Skyrim... And Oblivion plastic faces... Because the Bethesda games are the refugium of obsolete and exotic solutions, but Marmoset Toolbag is one of the industry standards. Yes, your wiki sucks, as your arguments.

Perhaps you should apply some sense of prioritization to your concerns by getting Bethesda to adhere to your preferred industry standards first. After all, they're a multibillion dollar company; I'm sure they can accomodate you.

Come back once you've done that and we'll talk about a small group of unpaid hobbyists doing the same.

The argument "the engine will never be released if we begin to add new features before 1.0" sucks for 2 reasons:
1) It might work, but you have rivals like MGEXE, MCP etc. They already give much more options both for players and modders. You are just useless.

There are some very serious limitations to what engine hacks can achieve, and there's literally nothing they can do that can't be implemented much more elegantly and easily in OpenMW.

2) You dislike "negativity", yep? I think you will dislike indifference even more. Old devs will leave the project, it's a normal process. But the new ones will go to your rivals, not to you. So it looks like OpenMW will never be released in this case too

I find that hard to believe. Almost no one wants to work on tediously reverse engineering a closed source engine from 2002 when they have full open source access to a near-flawless recreation.

Also, seeing as you seem to have one of those overly unhelpful and demanding personalities, I'm pretty sure I prefer your indifference to your mostly absurd negativity. I genuinely think you should go mind your own business given that, from what I can tell, you're not even really part of this project's intended audience.

Actually, it's the point of no return now: you can continue to ignore users - and you won't get even "negativity", just no reaction at all. Or you can try to change the opinion of the Morrowind modding community - and you already have understood, what the community thinks about you and your project. The current state of your "Example Suite" is a perfect illustration of this opinion. At least, the opinion of the artists of the community. Because this project now is a real crap, pardon me my French. The artists already ignore you, just like you ignore them. It's honest, isn't it?

The Example Suite is a one man project and there are logistical and technical reasons why other people find it hard to contribute to it: all the assets need to be entirely FOSS and all the work needs to be done in OpenMW's own unfinished construction set. Perhaps you should comment on it once its dependency on a more usable construction set is resolved.

Regardless, anyone who thinks this project is "real crap" has very little sense of perspective and a minimal amount of appreciation for the efforts of others. Luckily, you don't speak on behalf of Morrowind modders, most of whom have a lot of respect for the project even if they wish it was more open to experimentation in its pre-1.0 goals.

P.P.S. I'm going to finish this mesh at the New Year's holidays. So I make you a Christmas gift, though you were bad boys in this year: you still can get this mesh with all source files. Maybe. If you will be able to implement at least shadows and subsurface scattering in this year. Even in non-stable version. I know, I know, I'm too generous to yuo... But the Christian God tells us to be kind to our neighbour...

Hmm, can't make up your mind? I think I prefer peace and quiet over one mesh that doesn't even make sense for the Example Suite in the context of its non-reliance on Morrowind content.

Looking at how subsurface scattering (excluding the types that aren't very accurate) is implemented in real-time engines, I reckon the labour cost of that is probably more than your Vivec model, though, and it would have a much larger performance impact than I suspect you realise. As it requires an extra render pass to generate a depth map from the light's point of view, it's very similar to shadow mapping, but there are extra caveats. With shadows, you can usually get away with shadows only being cast by the main light in the scene, but that's not the case with subsurface scattering - all the major lights need a depth map, and they actually need more than one each to ensure that every object with subsurface scattering enabled has a depth map closely focused on it. Morrowind has a lot of lights, each of which can make a major contribution to any given object. This is in contrast to more modern games, where each light gets annotated with a bunch of data including which effects it can cause, so while more lights might affect each individual object, fewer require extra rendering passes. That means that any reasonable implementation is going to either be really, really slow or look bad unless someone redoes all of Morrowind's lighting ELFX-style (but also going through and adding a bunch of extra tags Skyrim doesn't have because it doesn't have a bunch of other effects modern renderers like Marmoset do).

I could get subsurface scattering working in a demo on its own with less effort than I estimate you've put into your Vivec model, but that doesn't help anyone. Integrating it into Morrowind properly is simply not worth the effort to anyone - if someone was really that annoyed, it would be easier to bake it into the diffuse maps of the models and use a script to swap them out on cell transition so that they always matched the right lighting conditions. A middle ground would be to add it in a way that reused the shadow maps, but the only benefit to that would be so that we could say we had the effect, and that doesn't really help anyone, but takes away time from other, more immediately visible, tasks.

Okay, the argument "we are hobbyists, so don't abuse us" sucks, because you already ask people for money on Patreon. I don't think, that community donates too much, though. Because you ignore them

Weird, Zini and I have been working on OpenMW for years without asking for money. We don't have Patreons. In addition to that, can you explain how anyone has the time to work on this full time and still feed themselves? Have you looked at Patreon accounts of developers? Or do you care not to? No one here is earning a living working on a hobby project.

If you believe we owe you something, sure thing, I'll send you an invoice for the $3 million [1] for services rendered and I will bill you $55K a year, every year for my salary. Thanks for offering!

I find it nothing short of astonishing that non-contributors believe they know better and should be the ones calling the shots.
If you think an open-source project goes the wrong way, feel free to contribute or leave constructive feedback. If you choose the latter, you are however not entitled to people in their spare time accomodating your wishes or even agreeing with you. You may be overruled. Then you'll either have to learn to code and create a fork or just deal with it.
It's really not that hard to understand.

I think everybody needs to remember that we are all on the same team. We all want morrowind as a game-play experience to succeed and be expressed in the best possible framework. Over the past year or 2 I have seen all sorts of drama and toxic threads (mostly on reddit) where people attack each other or try to push some narrative. If you observe somebody being hostile or attacking somebody over morrowind or the OpenMW project just ignore them. Giving these people attention won't make them go away.

I have stopped posting on the reddit threads because they have become inundated with misinformation, trolling and people who just like to sow confusion and discord. The worst part is that some big names and long time pillars of the community has falling victim to this, sometimes even engaging in the behavior themselves. Redirect, disregard and rise above the drama. Don't take the bait.

There are some genuine problems we've only been made aware of by engaging with this type of person. They're not the type to report problems the correct way on the issue tracker, and sometimes they're only the way that they are because they've encountered some catastrophic failure. There were several issues with the Windows build system and the instructions on how to use it that went completely unnoticed because a load of people saw a discussion about it somewhere and thought that was the correct place to discuss any issues, and that quickly became very negative, but once we found them and investigated properly, most of the problems could be fixed.

There are some genuine problems we've only been made aware of by engaging with this type of person. They're not the type to report problems the correct way on the issue tracker, and sometimes they're only the way that they are because they've encountered some catastrophic failure.

This is by far the biggest concern. This type of person is also the sort to not engage in the 'bubble' that OpenMW developers usually communicate on which is here: the forums.

We've made an attempt to reach out on IRC and Discord so that we become more open and available but we can't be everywhere.

Using reddit as an example, it is a full time job trying to just moderate that or be a voice of reason there. It's not like we have time to spare from work, family and friends. That we would rather work on OpenMW than actually engage in the forums, let alone other places on the Internet is really stretching us thin.

What we can do is help engage with people in these other places to be the voice of OpenMW and help promote them to a position of moderator or similar. Developers can't be expected to work on OpenMW and also manage PR. It is just another impediment to getting OpenMW to 1.0

You dislike "negativity", yep? I think you will dislike indifference even more.

This is a good distillation of the anxiety I have regarding the project. Speaking for myself, I'm not seeking to blast holes in team morale and sink the ship. My real goal is course correction. I would rather speak up now and risk a negative backlash, than see the project make mistakes and risk falling into obscurity. Believe me, if I didn't care about all of you and the hundreds of thousands of man hours you've already put in, I wouldn't be saying anything at all.

I don't know anything about sub-surface scattering, or bump maps, or shadow rendering. But I know enough to recognize that this isn't a very good argument:

Perhaps you should apply some sense of prioritization to your concerns by getting Bethesda to adhere to your preferred industry standards first. After all, they're a multibillion dollar company; I'm sure they can accomodate you.

Come back once you've done that and we'll talk about a small group of unpaid hobbyists doing the same.

First of all, because you don't have to look beyond the cold reception Fallout 76 has gotten to see how Bethesda's chickens have come home to roost insofar as "industry standards" are concerned. But more apropos than that, because OpenMW's real competition isn't Bethesda or the modern industry. It's other unpaid hobbyists.

I can download the Morrowind Overhaul, and in fifteen minutes, have a kitted-out Morrowind with 100+ mods, model and texture upgrades, and graphics and gameplay extension via MGE and MWSE. Unless I'm a hardcore Morrowind fan with an extensive knowledge of the user-driven landscape, I'm not going to recognize all of the ways OpenMW is superior, because most of OpenMW's improvements are under the hood. I'm probably just going to download the Morrowind Overhaul and stop at that because 1. it looks prettier and 2. it's the path of least resistance. That's what you need to overcome, and that's the reason I don't necessarily agree that "a one-to-one recreation of the original Morrowind" is necessarily the best goal post to strive for.

Looking past that. Let's get down to brass tacks. As psi29a pointed out, many hands make light work. So where's your social media presence? The OpenMW Twitter account hasn't been updated since December 5, 2017 -- exactly one year ago today. Why? A social media footprint would shine a spotlight on the project. Spotlight equals awareness. Awareness equals more volunteers on the project. More programmers, more artists, more collaborators. Where's the industry outreach? Where's the media outreach? There's a gaming press out there; why isn't OpenMW taking advantage of it? Ask yourself, why does Skywind get coverage while OpenMW doesn't? Answer: Because they put themselves out there. They make trailers. They post regular updates to social media, even if it's something as minor as an updated model or a pretty screenshot. As a result, they have ten times the engagement that OpenMW has on Twitter alone, and they're vaporware! They don't even have a product, and you do! How about Twitch engagement? YouTube engagement? Has anyone on the OpenMW team even talked to Zaric? He's covered the project extensively, he has extensive media and industry contacts, and he could presumably be a tremendously useful go-between to advertise the project and bring in additional talent. All this is stuff that seems really basic and obvious to me, and it staggers me that OpenMW seemingly just brushes it off as unimportant.

Developers can't be expected to work on OpenMW and also manage PR. It is just another impediment to getting OpenMW to 1.0

This is exactly what I'm talking about. No, PR isn't an impediment to getting OpenMW to 1.0, it's an essential tool for getting OpenMW to 1.0. If you had spent the last year advertising, you would have more monetary support on Patreon. If you had spent the last year advertising, you would have a larger team. If you had spent the last year advertising, you would have a bigger audience for your project, which would make each release more rewarding, which would improve morale, which would improve retention. Posts like this are so depressingly short-sighted. It makes me feel so defeated to read them. They're big red flags that warn against the future success of the project.

If OpenMW is programmer-heavy, and if none of the programmers have the time to do PR, why don't you advertise for a public relations position? Why don't you blow the dust off that Twitter account and put out the word: "OPENMW IS LOOKING FOR A PUBLIC RELATIONS AND MEDIA OUTREACH VOLUNTEER." Why don't you advertise it on your website? Heck, why isn't there a giant, shiny button on openmw.org that says "CLICK HERE TO VOLUNTEER", so interested parties with something to contribute know what you need and have an easy way to get in touch with the team leads? Even your website design is shooting you in the foot, and you don't even realize it, nor pay it any mind.